News and views

Five lessons we should learn from PISA

Read the latest blog by ASCL’s Director of Policy and Public Relations Leora Cruddas

Five lessons we should learn from PISA

05 Dec 2016

by Leora Cruddas

Amid the heat that will undoubtedly accompany tomorrow’s announcements from the OECD, we need to retain a sense of proportion and perspective. PISA results are an important opportunity for us to look up and out – to consider our education system in the context of other systems in Europe and beyond.

Here are five things to bear in mind:

No approach to testing that compares countries with different cultures and education systems will be perfect. But that’s not a reason to dismiss PISA as useless or misleading. We need informed analysis of the results – not a lot of ranting about relative rankings.

What can we learn about whether standards here are rising and whether educational reforms are working? These are arguably more important questions than worrying over how we can become more like South East Asia. There may well be lessons we can learn from others, but equally our educational system and social context is vastly different. What we need to know is whether the enormous programme of educational reform which has taken place in this country is moving us in the right direction

We can and should embrace learning from high-performing and rising countries or jurisdictions – but this should be more than ‘policy tourism'. We must also be wary of espousing causal links between education policy and outcomes. Correlation is not causation. But this should not stop us from having a proper look at the evidence underpinning some of the pedagogical approaches in successful jurisdictions.

A focus on the status of teaching is important. When Ontario started its improvement journey, one of just three system goals was building public confidence in the education system. It is a truism now to quote the McKinsey report, How the World’s Best Performing Systems Come Out on Top: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” In a country fast approaching a recruitment and retention crisis, we need most of all to keep the focus on what matters most: our teachers. Recruiting them. Retaining them. Paying them properly. Supporting them with world-class professional learning programmes.

We know that high expectations of our children and young people is key to their success. This is perhaps the most important point. In the most successful countries, intelligence is not perceived to be ‘fixed'. There is no sense of ‘innate’ ability. It follows that our focus in this country must be a good education for all. If we are to be equipped to be a truly global player, we need an education system in which the vast majority of young people are prepared for the service-led, knowledge-based and digital economy we now have. In other words, we need an education system in which all young people achieve. This is a clear economic imperative.

So, amid the heat that tomorrow’s report will generate, let’s also hope for some light in the ensuing debate. PISA excites strong opinions, but what we need is a cool, objective look at the wealth of data it provides to see what we can learn.